Dr. Franklin's Island

by Ann Halam

  “In good health,” he said, leaning forward, steepling his hands and beaming at us over his fingertips. “Highly resourceful, psychologically very resilient. Good! Excellent!”

  “Resilient?” I repeated. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the word, it was because I couldn’t understand why these compliments sounded so creepy.

  “It means you bounce back, young ladies. You don’t crawl into a corner whimpering when you’re faced with a tremendous challenge. You deal with it. Now, Dr. Skinner tells me you’ve been asking a lot of questions. Naturally, you want to know what we are doing here. Let me see. I’d better start by finding out what you know.”

  “We don’t—” I began. I was going to tell him we weren’t interested in what was going on, and we didn’t want to know about his nasty experiments, we wanted to leave. At once. But Miranda kicked me and shook her head a little, so I stayed quiet. I remembered what she’d said to me and Arnie on the beach, long ago. Any information might be useful.

  There was a glowing white screen on the wall behind his desk. He tapped some keys on a keyboard in front of him, and an image appeared there.

  I couldn’t make it out much.

  “Can either of you tell me what this is?”

  “I think it’s a photograph of some human chromosomes,” said Miranda.

  “Ah! Good, very good. Excellent! And do you know what chromosomes are? Semi?”

  “What DNA comes in,” I said. “The sort of packets that DNA comes in, in the nucleus of a cell.”

  “Good. Now then, do you either of you know what transgenic means?”

  “It’s genetic engineering,” I said. “If you insert different genes, or parts of genes, into the chromosomes in a cell, and you can get the cell to accept them and make them work, then the plant or animal or whatever will develop differently. It will be a transgenic organism. Like, you can make crops that are resistant to weed killer, so you can spray the whole field and only the weeds will die. We’ve done a bit about that, in school.”

  “Good, very good,” said Dr. Franklin again, with his creepy beaming smile. “But as you have seen, on the little tour Dr. Skinner gave you, our work is of a different order. We are tackling a much greater challenge, much more exciting than tinkering around with vegetables. We are . . .” He stopped, and smirked. “Well, not to let false modesty get in the way, let’s say I. I, with the assistance of Dr. Skinner, am on the brink of producing transgenic human beings. Think about it! See if you can picture some of the possibilities. Imagine being as strong as an elephant. Imagine being able to use sunshine to make food, like a plant. Imagine being able to fly like a bird. Imagine being able to breathe underwater, and swim with the fishes. Imagine . . . though this is farther off, I admit . . . being able to breathe different gases, or live comfortably in the hard vacuum of space.”

  He paused and stared at us expectantly. I nodded, and I saw Miranda doing the same. I wondered if she was feeling as bewildered as I was. I had that tingling feeling in my throat and stomach, stronger than ever. I looked behind me. I hadn’t realized it before, but Dr. Skinner was still there, at another, smaller desk, making notes on a laptop computer.

  It was like being on a mad, horrible school trip. We’d had the tour, now we were getting the talk from the person in charge. Dr. Franklin started to tell us about his first human trials, which he said were about to begin. He was planning to build a human-bird and a human-fish. He said there were very good technical reasons why certain kinds of animals were among the first he would attempt, but happily they were also the forms with the most exciting advantages, for the future of the race. . . .

  Miranda and I managed to exchange glances while he was pointing at his screen. We didn’t need to speak. The message He’s mad passed between us loud and clear. We both turned to look at Dr. Skinner. He knew we were looking at him. I saw his forehead and his ears turning redder than ever. But he kept his head down, and kept on tapping away at the keys. It was obvious we would get no help there.

  “So, which would you like best to be, Semi? Miranda? A bird, or a fish? In my case, I think flight would be the great attraction. If I had your young cells, but alas it’s too late. Would you like to make your choice now? Or shall I tell you more?” said Dr. Franklin.

  We wanted to get out of there. But that wasn’t on the menu.

  “Please, tell us more,” said Miranda faintly.

  So Dr. Franklin told us more. He told us that the idea of growing a new kind of human being from scratch was a nonstarter, and everyone who was trying that kind of research was a benighted fool. Chances of success were much greater with his special secret method, that nobody else had tried, of putting new genes into a ready-made living human body, and getting it to change. He’d proved this with his animal experiments. He told us how he could inject artificial chromosomes into the bone marrow, and then the normal cells in the body would be rapidly replaced by cells with different DNA that would take over and change the whole organism. “Like cuckoos in the nest!” he said (and laughed loudly, at his own joke). He told us how a human skeleton would become a fish skeleton, with the bones turning to cartilage; or, in the case of the bird transgenic, the bird-person’s bones would become hollow and “gracile” (that means fragile and slight). How the bird-person’s blood would be altered so it could process more oxygen, because flight takes a huge amount of energy. Oxygen is the fuel the body burns to power its muscles, and a bird has much bigger muscles, relative to body weight, than a human. How the fishperson’s limbs would fall off or fuse together, and gills would grow in the person’s neck. How the lungs would be changed, and the liver, and the skin . . . Images, blurred and meaningless to me, kept flashing up on the wall screen. Sometimes he’d swing around on his chair, and point at them with a laser light pen.

  I kept thinking that we ought to ask questions. Maybe we could get on the right side of this madman, by pretending to be keen about his insane ideas. But Miranda had gone very quiet, and I couldn’t make myself speak. My throat had closed up, and my ears were ringing. I felt as if someone had given me a huge smack around the head. Dizzy, dazed, sort of otherworldly, as if I was going to faint. It had to be a joke. Surely, this must be a joke. He couldn’t really be planning to do the kind of unbelievable things he was describing to real people. Either it was a joke, or I was dreaming. I felt like crying, or bursting into hysterical laughter. Every so often he’d stop and wait, staring at us with those bright eyes, and we’d nod at him madly. That was all he seemed to expect.

  At last he stopped, and didn’t start up again. The screen went gray. It was over.

  “Any questions?”

  Miranda said, stubbornly, “When can we call our parents?”

  Dr. Franklin looked pleased. He chuckled, and shook his head.

  “Full marks for persistence, Miranda, and for keeping your own interests in mind. Well done. You may go now. My assistant will give you each an information pack. Study the literature carefully. Dr. Skinner, you can take them back to the ward.” He came out from behind the desk and shook our hands again.

  “I’m very pleased to have such excellent candidates for my first human trials. Fortune smiles on me. Well, fortune always favors the brave, they say. Now you should get some rest. You have a big day tomorrow. And remember, you’re totally free to make that choice.”

  Dr. Skinner walked us back through the zoo again. He stopped by the capybara enclosure, and stared at the one with human legs and human lips.

  “Where d’you get the human genes from?” said Miranda, her voice expressionless.

  He looked at her with a sneer. “Where do you think? From humans. Originally some of the DNA was mine, and some of it was his. Rebuilt, of course . . . Lately we’ve been using DNA cultured from tissue samples taken from our employees’ children. Young cells are essential for the kind of work we’re doing now. The kids don’t know what we’re doing, they don’t suffer any harm. A scraping from the inside of your cheek, or a small blood sample, never hurt an
yone.”

  Miranda nodded. “But why the lips?” she whispered (as if she didn’t want the poor capybara to hear). “Why the back legs? It seems so pointless. What’s the advantage?”

  “It doesn’t work like that, Miranda. Transgenics can be rather . . . random. Sometimes we don’t know, until we see the results, what part of the animal is going to change.”

  “What happens if you change something so it doesn’t w-work anymore?” I quavered.

  “We’ve had plenty of losses. And some survive in very twisted forms. But our goal is to take humanity beyond all the limits. Of course there’s a price to pay.”

  He walked us on.

  “Where do you get the animals?” said Miranda. “Are they wildlife from the island?”

  “Some,” he said. “The pigs, the parrots, the bats, the snakes. Others we buy.”

  “You mean you have a supplier, who makes deliveries? By air, or by sea?”

  Dr. Skinner smiled that thin smile again. “You never give up, do you, Miranda?”

  “Do all the people in uniform live on the island?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “With their families, and all the amenities. Dr. Franklin treats his employees well. They’re very loyal to him. They wouldn’t help anyone who wanted to leave without his permission. That’s definitely not worth considering.” And he laughed.

  When we got back to the ward the guards stayed outside. Dr. Skinner handed each of us one of the plastic folders that he’d been carrying since we left Dr. Franklin, showed us into our cages and locked the doors. Then he stood looking at us with horror and pity. Exactly the way we’d looked at the weird animals in Dr. Franklin’s zoo.

  We stared back at him.

  “This is crazy,” said Miranda at last. “You can’t keep us here, Dr. Skinner. What your boss is doing to those animals is horrible, but it’s none of our business. We’re not going to tell anyone. You have to let us go.”

  “We’ve got family, we’ve got friends,” I babbled. “You can’t keep us prisoners—”

  “Oh yes we can, Semi. Think about it. Try to put two and two together. Your charter plane crashed forty-five days ago, off course and some time after sending an emergency message that appeared to indicate a massive midair explosion. We’ve been in contact with the Search and Rescue operation. They found no survivors, no wreckage, and when their search widened to include this area, we were able to tell them nothing. No one’s looking for you anymore. We’ve been waiting until we were sure of that, and if you hadn’t found your way to us, we’d have been coming to pick you up soon.”

  Have you ever been afraid you were lost? When you were little—at a fairground, or in a crowded shopping center maybe? Maybe you remember how at first you didn’t realize what was wrong. You were sure the next person you ran up to would be your mother, the next big man-shape you saw would be Daddy. But the strange faces look down at you, not Daddy, not Mummy; and you run away from them. You start running faster, as if by running you can catch up with the normal world that was all around you a few minutes ago; and be safe. In the end you’re running through the crowd of big people, tears pouring down your face, frightened to death.

  “We didn’t know how we were going to tackle the human trials,” he said, watching our faces. “But you are ideal. You are missing, believed dead. You don’t exist.”

  But things are even worse than you imagined, not just lost, lost forever, but . . .

  Cold tremors went through me. The monstrous truth was dawning on me, and I knew why Dr. Skinner had looked so afraid, so horrified, right from the first moment—

  “He’s not really going to experiment on us!” I gasped, in utter disbelief. “Not really!”

  “I’m afraid he is.”

  “What if we say no?” said Miranda at last. “Will he kill us?”

  “Kill you? Certainly not. What use would that be? Dr. Franklin is going to change you, the way the animals you’ve seen were changed. You are the next stage. You won’t ‘say no.’ You won’t be asked for your consent. Didn’t you hear me? You don’t exispt.”

  “You can’t let this happen,” said Miranda. “We’re innocent human beings.”

  He laughed, bitterly. “Is there such a thing as an innocent human being? I don’t think so.” He ran his hands through his thinning hair, and wiped the sweat that had gathered on his forehead, although it was cool in there. “I’ve tried to put it off,” he muttered, staring at us as if he hated us, “but it was bound to come to this. We’ve gone as far as we can, infusing human genetic material into dumb animals. Don’t you see? We can’t exactly advertise for teenage volunteers for this, can we? But we have to have human trials. It’s the only next step.”

  “Then experiment on yourselves!” snapped Miranda.

  “I said teenage. Haven’t you been listening to a word you’ve been told? We are too old, Dr. Franklin and I. This is the way it has to be, and you can forget about appealing to my better nature. I have none.” He came closer to the bars, his voice rising hysterically. “He’s a genius. He’s crazy, but he is a genius. You’ll serve the cause of human progress. You will become more than human! Look on it as a great adventure.”

  “I don’t believe this,” said Miranda, flatly. “It’s not going to happen. You are not going to let it happen. You’ll keep us for a few days, you’ll talk Dr. Franklin out of his crazy idea, and you’ll see that he lets us go. Now can we have something to eat?”

  He shook his head. “No. Nothing to eat. An orderly will bring you some water. You’ll be having your premed early tomorrow morning. The initial bone marrow extraction will be done under general anesthetic.” He started to walk away, then he turned back. “Oh, by the way. Don’t try pleading with our orderlies. They don’t understand much English, and even if they did, they accept completely Dr. Franklin’s right to deal with trespassers. I told you, Miranda, they are very loyal, all of them. They know our work here is very secret, very sensitive. I think they have, ah, an idea that we are connected with the U.S. government. It isn’t true, but it’s a useful story. They will not help you.”

  One of the men in uniform came, with a carafe of water and two paper cups. He waited while we drank, and took the cups and the carafe away. He didn’t speak to us. We didn’t speak until he was gone. I looked at the bars of my cage. How thick they were. I wondered why Dr. Franklin had made them so thick. Why did the beds have to be in cages at all? What did he think would happen when he started turning human beings into something “more than human”?

  At last Miranda said softly, looking at the floor of her cage, “When Dr. Skinner came to fetch us, he knew we were awake. Let’s see if we can spot the cameras.”

  We paced up and down, saying things that didn’t matter. I said, “He thinks we were forty-five days on the beach. I wonder when our count went wrong. . . .”

  “Maybe it didn’t, maybe we’re right, and he’s trying to confuse us. . . .”

  “I wonder if it’s still Day Forty. Maybe it’s Day Forty-one. I’m hungry enough. We don’t know how long we were knocked out for.”

  “I think it’s still Day Forty.” She glanced at me, and nodded slightly. She’d found the camera lens peering down on us from a slot high up in the wall. We took the two information packs and sat on the floor, up against the bars that separated us, with our backs as if accidentally turned to that spying eye, and kept our voices low. There wasn’t much point in this. The true horror was that our captors didn’t care what we plotted against their schemes. No more than if we’d been two guinea pigs planning a breakout. But it made us feel a little bit better.

  I turned the pages, occasionally muttering something to Miranda. But I couldn’t take in anything. I dropped my spinning head in my hands.

  “Oh, Miranda, this can’t be real,” I whispered. “Can it be? Is this real?”

  “I hope not,” she said grimly. “I hope it’s a nightmare and we’ll wake up safe on the beach, alone with those nice friendly sharks in the lagoon. But if it’s a nig
htmare it’s very realistic, because he’s real. Dr. George Franklin. I’ve heard of him.”

  “What do you mean, you’ve heard of him?”

  “From my parents. You remember, I told you about them. They’re anthropologists.”

  “That means they study people, doesn’t it? What’s that got to do with genetic engineering?”

  “Nothing much. But a few years ago Dr. George Franklin was famous, in science. He had all kinds of ideas about how humans might be changed, in the future, by genetic engineering. The same sort of thing as he was saying to us. Imagine if people could fly, imagine if people could live under the ocean. People listened to him, even though the things he was suggesting were completely impossible back then. And they still are, as far as I know. . . . But he’s very rich, he inherited a huge fortune, so he didn’t need anyone’s approval. He ran his own projects and paid his own scientists to work on his weird ideas. I think he was even a futurology consultant or something to the U.S. government, for a while. Then he got prosecuted for doing some cruel experiments on chimpanzees. That was the end of his public career. My parents and their friends used to use his name as an example of a mad scientist, science gone bad. That’s why I remembered.”

  “Is that why you went all quiet, back in his office?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s crazy, isn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I think you could safely say that.”

  “And Skinner’s mad too. The way he looks at us . . . the things he says.”

  “Yes. They’re definitely both insane.”

  “But they can’t experiment on us. They just can’t, they just can’t.”

  “I think we have to work on Dr. Skinner,” said Miranda. “I think what happened over the chimpanzees was that one of Dr. Franklin’s assistants had an attack of guilty conscience, and blew the whistle on him. We have to get Skinner to do that.”